South Africa's Sommelier

Eight years ago, Luvo Ntezo was working as a dishwasher. Now, as Cape Town's most trusted authority on wine, he's a symbol of the country's distinctive postapartheid viniculture

ENLARGE

VINEYARD HAVEN | Ntezo in the vineyards of the Steenberg Winery, just outside Cape Town
Portrait by David Chancellor

By

Tom Downey

Jan. 17, 2013 4:42 p.m. ET

IN OLD-WORLD WINE COUNTRIES, the obligations of a sommelier are clear: help diners sift through a selection of varietals and vintners, then present and serve the chosen wines with precision and care. In places like South Africa, though, where until very recently not many people actually drank wine, a sommelier's job description is a little different. "I get a lot of South Africans who are new to wine," says Luvo Ntezo, 30, who now serves as sommelier at Cape Town's One & Only hotel. "Most black South Africans started drinking wine only in the past 10 years or so."

Photos: Vineyard Dreams

Click to view slideshow. Delaire Graff Images

Many of Ntezo's customers are part of a newly affluent black professional class that is an increasingly significant demographic in postapartheid South Africa. Nineteen years after the end of apartheid, these black diamonds, as they are known locally, are wealthy enough to partake in the finer things. Likewise, the new vines that were planted at that time, when the wine industry was overhauled, are finally beginning to yield superior wines. All of this has paved the way for something unimaginable a decade ago: A black South African is now the country's finest young sommelier.

Eight years ago, Ntezo was working as a dishwasher at a hotel in Cape Town, trying to earn a little money to help continue his studies. One Friday afternoon, as the waiters gathered for their weekly wine tasting, the hotel's sommelier opened a bottle, poured sips for the staff and asked what they thought of the vintage. "Hints of mocha," a barman said. "Notes of apricot," a waiter ventured, which was followed by more earnest proclamations from wine-tasting amateurs. The sommelier spotted Ntezo hand-polishing glasses and, as an afterthought, graciously poured him a taste. Ntezo sniffed the wine and couldn't stop himself from smirking. He was no expert but had learned a little something about wine at his previous job working as a pool boy at a winemaker-run hotel. He took a small sip. "But it's corked," he said. The assistant manager of the hotel turned to his head sommelier, who took another sip and nodded that it was, indeed, a bad bottle.

Ntezo's subsequent ascent was swift: The hotel sent him to school to study wine; he was appointed their new head sommelier; and he went on to win South Africa's best young sommelier competition.

Ntezo's story isn't just inspiring—it also offers insight into a remarkable development in South Africa's viniculture. During apartheid, boycotts targeting the country's racist policies had isolated its wine-making industry from the rest of the world, which meant that modern cultivation techniques, foreign varietals and rich export markets were all effectively off-limits. In the postapartheid era, the wine market has broadened and expanded—importing vines and growing methods— radically improving the wine made there.

Even so, Ntezo has to introduce wine to drinkers who may know little or nothing about Bordeaux, Riesling or Pinot Noir. His approach is simple: Wine can't just be about taste, color and mouth feel. It must also tell a story. "When I serve Grangehurst's Nikela, of course I want people to notice the blend of grapes," says Ntezo. "But I also tell them that Nikela means 'tribute' in the Xhosa language, that winemaker Jeremy Walker created this wine as a memorial to his parents and that he bottled his first batch of Grangehurst on their former squash court in Stellenbosch. That's something they'll always remember and associate with the wine." It's sommelier as storyteller, a role for which Ntezo is well suited as he confidently looks down over his spectacles at customers more than twice his age.

The One & Only hotel group opened its first South African property in Cape Town three years ago and launched with a Gordon Ramsay restaurant in the space where Ntezo now works. In 2010, the hotel shuttered that outlet and brought in South African chef Reuben Riffel, who created a new branch of Reuben's, his restaurant from the Cape Winelands region. Riffel cooks simple, fresh South African food, using local ingredients prepared in a style strongly influenced by his Cape Malay background. (The Cape Malay community comprises ethnic Malays who began to emigrate to Cape Town more than 200 years ago.) "The food Reuben cooks is the food I knew growing up in the region," says Ntezo. "Things like bobotie, a Cape Malay minced-meat curry." Ntezo's challenge is to find wines that don't just stand up to the strong, spicy flavors in Riffel's cooking but that also bring something more to the palate. "I see my job as finding a wine that helps complete what a dish is giving you," Ntezo says. "But it's hard. A chef can create exactly the flavors he wants. I can only work with what the winemakers give me."

Related in Off Duty

Just as the One & Only realized that diners wanted something distinctively South African—and not another international chain restaurant—so too does Ntezo understand that customers now want to drink local wine, not bottles imported from abroad. That's partly national pride and price consciousness, but it's also a reflection of the sheer variety of new South African wines. "Other new-world wine countries do one or two styles of wine well," says South African Darren Humphreys, who leads wine tourists to South Africa. "But South Africa has a varied climate, and its winemakers have an experimental approach." Much of the South African wine that reaches America's shelves is marketed as a lower-cost alternative to American or European offerings, which means that the country's highest-quality wines are often available only for the domestic market. A trip here is an opportunity to drink vintages that are impossible to procure at home.

And there is no shortage of distinctive wines to be savored. Apart from being ringed by beautiful mountains and two great oceans, Cape Town is also surrounded by many of the country's significant wine-making regions, which means Ntezo can hop in his car on a Saturday morning and, 40 minutes later, be drinking new offerings at the vineyards of his winemaker friends. "People choose to live in Cape Town because of its beauty, its location, its mountain backdrop," says Ntezo. "Sommeliers choose to live here because it puts us right next to the most important wine-producing region on the continent."

Though Ntezo's specialty is South African wine, he trained for international competitions by tasting the finest vintages in the world. After he'd won South Africa's young sommelier competition, he was sent to Vienna in 2008 to vie for the world championship. To help him prepare for competition against young sommeliers from France, Italy and England, who'd spent years drinking European wines, One & Only general manager Clive Bennett found him a wine mentor and shipped in cases of French and Italian wines. Ntezo placed fourth and returned home with the skills to measure South Africa's wine against the best in the world.

On Wine

Wine sellers targeting countries with newly wealthy populations have often adopted the same simple sales tactic: offer the most expensive, exclusive and famous French Burgundies and Bordeauxs to their Chinese, Russian, Indian and Brazilian customers. Even in Johannesburg, Ntezo argues, customers often gravitate toward the priciest offerings on the wine list. "In Jo'burg they drink wine to massage their egos," he says. "In Cape Town we drink wine to massage our palates."

Still, many wealthy South Africans are in search of good value when they open Ntezo's wine list. Years ago that would have meant drinking old South African mainstays like pinotage—a distinctively South African blend of Pinot Noir and Cinsaut—or Chenin Blanc. Now sommeliers like Ntezo have more choices to recommend and can find a ready and interesting South African corollary to the foreign wines that their guests already love—most likely a wine that came of age in the last decade or so, just as Ntezo did. And they can be found just down the road.

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